Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Touching the lands or not...

Big Stick,
Do you seat your Barnes TSX's kissing the lands?

Thanks,

Huntr

Like Wildswalker said - I have a 300RUM that is seated an entire dial and a half back off of the lands and shoots very well. I was lucky too because the magazine length determined where the closest seating could occur with a 200 gr. NP. But, having said that, I like to start about .005 off and work back seeking out that sweet spot.

No sweet spot, no more rifle. Has only happened once. With enough patience and trying different components, reloaders have a much better opportunity to find that perfect load as opposed to purchasing factory ammo (which is much better than in years past).

I must admit that early on, I wouldn't have believed that I could have gotten even "reasonable" groups not seated right up against the lands. These days, wherever it wants to be seated, that's where I'll seat her.

Like Blaine, I load all my hunting rifles well off the lands, and my varmint target rifles well into the lands. Ultimate accuracy is usually found into the lands, and as long as you have time to tune to the local conditions, this works fine.

"Kissing" the lands has always been an unholy compromise that invited all the accuracy demons to ride on every bullet.

Loading off the lands tends to be far more consistent across conditions (than into the lands), and avoids the undeniable pitfalls associated with loading hunting rounds into the lands.

In hunting rifles, even with match tubes, I've never found the difference in accuracy to be more than a few tenths of a MOA. More often than not, the difference is too small to say for sure there IS a difference. A small price to pay for a load that is robust across conditions and piece of mind. FWIW, Dutch.

Dutch,

I have seen the same thing. A bullet seated .020 or .030+ away from the lands seems to be less sensitive to small variances in seating depth or powder charge than one at or in the lands.